The winner

With a drop of 64% from the previous weekend, the second-biggest fall in the top 10, you might think that, after all the hype, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 isn't finding favour with audiences. Rate of decline is the key measure of word of mouth's strength.

But it's not as simple as that. First, second-weekend takings of £8.52m are a bit higher than Part 1's £8.34m for the second frame, and way ahead of equivalent results for other recent entries in the Potter franchise. More importantly, it's not just about how a film performs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Over the past seven days, Deathly Hallows has added more than £20m to its cumulative total. No other Potter film has grossed such a sum in the week following its opening, and the equivalent number for Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is less than £15m.

After 10 days on release, Part 2's total stands at a record-breaking £44.27m, within sniffing distance of the UK box-office's top earner this year, The King's Speech (£45m). Once Monday takings are added, the picture will already have overtaken Tom Hooper's Oscar winner to be the biggest movie of 2011. With kids off from school for the rest of the summer, Potter clearly has a long way to go yet.

Pixar hits speed bump

Exactly a year ago, Toy Story 3 debuted in UK cinemas with £21.19m including previews of £9.69m. Now, Pixar returns with its latest sequel, Cars 2, which sputters out of the starting grid with a mediocre £3.54m. Not a great result for John Lasseter's animation maestros and distribution powerhouse Disney.

Such is Pixar's creative consistency, it's easy to imagine the studio has enjoyed consistent box-office returns in the 15 years since Toy Story. However, that's not the case. Having peaked in the early noughties with Toy Story 2 (£44.3m), Monsters, Inc (£37.9m) and Finding Nemo (£37.4m), grosses took a big dive here with Cars (£16.5m), and failed to fully recover with Ratatouille (£24.8m) and Wall-E (£22.9m). Up (£34.6m) marked a big return to commercial form, before Toy Story 3 (£73.9m) went supernova.

The Cars 2 opening is definitely one of Pixar's weakest results, but it's not so very far behind Ratatouille (£4.44m) or Wall-E (£4.25m) and is ahead of the debut of the original Cars (£2.67m). Cars went on to achieve a final gross of more than six times its opening, and if the sequel performs similarly it will cross the finishing line with nearly £22m. Even if it stalls before then, lots of Finn McMissile toys will be sold to an eager fanbase of primary school-age boys. Cars has always been more about merchandise sold than bums on seats.

The comedy face-off

When Warners UK dated Horrible Bosses for 22 July release, the distributor probably never imagined that rival comedy Bridesmaids would still be providing formidable opposition in its fifth week of play. But with Judd Apatow's wedding flick experiencing another relatively shallow dip (down 35%), delivering a fifth straight weekend at £1m-plus, it's clear that a portion of the potential Horrible Bosses audience was otherwise occupied. Five weekends at seven figures, incidentally, is a feat that eluded the summer's biggest hits, including the latest edition of the Pirates of the Caribbean, Hangover and Transformers franchises.

Given that context, Horrible Bosses has done well to achieve an opening of £2.08m. That number is slightly behind the pace set by the US ($28m, suggesting a UK debut of £2.8m), but then lead actors Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman and Charlie Day are all less well known here. The figure is slightly ahead of the recent opening for Bad Teacher (£1.96m), but behind Bridesmaids' initial tally of £3.44m including £1.03m in previews.

In Ireland, top comedy continues to be The Guard, which has amassed £1.77m in 17 days and has a good chance of clearing £2m by this time next week.

The arthouse battle

Top niche release is Mike Mills's Beginners, which benefited from the marketing muscle of powerful distributor Universal, achieving a so-so debut of £146,000 from 69 screens, including £3,000 in previews. Films in limited play usually yield stronger opening averages than that. The same might be said of The Big Picture, starring Romain Duris, which managed £45,500 from 21 screens to earn 13th place, and may be struggling to convince either as an arthouse drama or a gripping thriller.

Both new entrants face competition for the upscale audience from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, which clings on in the top 10 in its third week of play, having experienced successive declines of 34% and 57%. Its total so far of £1.22m certainly puts it in the category of relatively successful Palme d'Or winners. Last year's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives maxed out at about one tenth of that number.

The future

Despite a healthy contribution from Deathly Hallows and solid new entrants in Cars 2 and Horrible Bosses, the weekend is way behind the pace of the equivalent frame from 2010, when Toy Story 3 opened. A more helpful indicator, perhaps, is that overall the market ranks seventh out of the past 52 weekends, and is 38% ahead of the average over that period. Looking at the next frame, in 2010 cinemas benefited from the arrival of The Karate Kid and The A-Team. This time, we have Captain America: The First Avenger, plus family comedies Zookeeper and Horrid Henry. The Marvel superhero film has opened strongly in the US but may struggle to match that pace in the UK, and the same could be said for Kevin James and talking animals. Homegrown property Horrid Henry is hard to call.